Elenowen throw logic out the window on their sophomore album, For the Taking, released earlier this year. The husband and wife duo, made up of singer/songwriters Josh and Nicole Johnson, gained exposure on the first season of NBC’s The Voice and have continued to develop that recognition with their music being featured on TV shows like Nashville, Pretty Little Liars and Army Wives.

That’s not to say there weren’t struggles along the way. Josh and Nicole recall early hurdles as they were getting national attention on The Voice. During that time, they were still living in Nicole’s parent’s basement, something they say inspired much of the autobiographical record.

“After the exposure from The Voice, touring and getting more buzz around us than we ever had, that aspect of our career was great but at the same time we were still living in her parent’s basement and we had lived there for five-and-a-half years,” Josh recalls while sitting in the basement of his publicist’s office on Music Row beside Nicole and their son Nolan. “We were at the stage of our marriage where we were married almost six years at the time and Nicole’s biggest piece of her identity was to be a mom and she was missing it.”

Nicole and Josh Johnson with their son, Nolan, in Nashville

He adds that For the Taking captures the struggle of the couple trying to figure out how to keep their career momentum going but also the desire of starting a family. Much of the album was written in that basement apartment as they looked out the basement window dreaming of getting out.

“I would say there’s a decent amount of desperation and hope in the record. We landed on the title For the Taking near the end of that season where we did actually get pregnant and we did find ourselves a house,” he says with a smile. “It was a massive step of faith of, ‘This is where we feel we need to be going so let’s start and take it in our own hands.'”

Nicole chimes in, explaining that previously they had spent so much time waiting to make decisions on what felt logical instead of what made them happy.

“We finally tossed that [logic] to the wind and started making decisions based on what we wanted out of life,” she says. “It still makes things extremely difficult because logic is there for a reason. Logic makes things sometimes easier.”

But, as heard on For the Taking, logic isn’t always the best route. Josh and Nicole agree that “One By One,” a song of theirs featured on Nashville, is one of the most honest songs on the album. With Nicole singing, “Don’t walk away/Don’t walk away from me baby/Even though I’m going to treat you so badly sometimes,” Josh says they don’t sugarcoat the struggles they’re going through. Other songs, like “Desert Days,” bring about comparisons to Fleetwood Mac, a welcomed compliment for the duo.

“If we remind people of Fleetwood Mac when they listen to us, alright! I don’t know what more I want as far as people to get out of it,” Josh says, beaming. “For me, doing music, that was the only thing I was really passionate about when I first started. It was the first thing I grabbed onto. When we started doing it as a duo it had a little more momentum than anything I had done alone. It got me really excited about it. This was the best thing we’ve got going for us, let’s chase after it. It was the most viable option to keep pursuing. I was steering the ship.”

While Nicole admits some days were tougher than others, helping fulfill Josh’s dream was something she never hesitated to do until it started to threaten her own dream.

“Even in the hardest days that I wanted to quit, there was always that thing in the back of my mind where I didn’t want to wonder my whole life, ‘What if?’ That’s what kept me going,” she says. “Doing music is Josh’s biggest dream and I wanted to help him in that. Because we’re a duo it’s not like I can just be like, ‘All right, I’m going to check out and do it on your own.’ In a way I was stuck in it, but not in a resentful way.”

She adds: “When it was a matter of me not being able to have kids because of it, that’s when I was starting to be like, ‘OK, I’m giving up all of my dreams for this thing that I don’t even know what’s happening.’ But now that we’re trying to figure out how to do both it’s more challenging but it’s also more rewarding at the same time. Just seeing it through, taking it a day at a time. That’s all you can do.”

Now they’re out of the basement and continue their musical journey by touring to support their latest release For the Taking and raising their one-year-old son.

“We’re in a little house that’s not much but it feels like the Taj Mahal compared to the basement,” Josh laughs. “We got this little guy chewing on everything, crawling on everything.”

I’m convinced that 2015 is the year girls take back country radio. Country duo Maddie & Tae are proving just this as they released their debut album Start Here on Friday (Aug. 28) and it’s full of powerful songs all penned by them. I spoke with Maddie & Tae in April about their album and why it’s so important that the duo give a voice to other women on the radio.

“Giving girls a voice is so special to both of us and we just feel blessed to do that,” Maddie Marlow explains. “There’s all different types of songs on our record, all different types of stories. ‘Girl in a Country Song’ was one where we were like, ‘We know other people feel this way, and we’re gonna hold the torch for this message.’ And it worked.”

“Girl in a Country Song” went to No. 1 on the country charts and helped launch Maddie & Tae’s career. While the song called out the men on the radio for singing about girls in the passenger seat, Maddie & Tae’s album proves that they’re not just sitting back and looking pretty. Instead, the duo is driving full speed ahead with their vivid storytelling and smart lyrics, showing why females should be heard on country radio. Their second single, “Fly” is an inspirational song that urges us all to keep on climbing those insurmountable obstacles while other songs like “Shut Up and Fish” continues the humor of “Girl in a Country Song” by putting a guy in his place when he clearly has much more than fishing on his mind.

“I think people were noticing that you never hear a woman’s voice, or perspective, on the radio,” Tae Dye adds. “So that was important for us to hold that torch and be like, ‘OK, we’re gonna bring women back and we’re gonna come at it full force with a very strong message that we’re very passionate about.’”

“Both of us were raised as strong, independent women who have trouble putting their guard down,” Maddie continues. “Songwriting was a challenge for both of us, to go in a room, and pour our hearts out, sometimes to a stranger if we were working with a person we hadn’t written with before.”

She said being that vulnerable is something she and Tae struggled with in the writing room but it’s that vulnerability that has allowed them to write their best songs.

“Strangers have come up to me and said, ‘Your song did this for me because this thing happened in my life,’ because we allowed ourselves to be so vulnerable,” Maddie says. “I think there’s something so beautiful about that.”

Both Maddie & Tae say that Start Here is their complete truth. The album is 11 songs that tell the stories of their lives over the past five years, all of which they co-wrote themselves.

“The title explains everything,” Tae asserts. “We choose Start Here as the title because it’s just the beginning and it’s the first taste that our fans are getting and we plan to make make many more and there’s not going to be an end.”

Maddie & Tae’s Start Here is available now. This interview first appeared on Radio.com.

Lindi Ortega took the stage of New York’s Mercury Lounge to screams Tuesday (Aug. 4) night. And for good reason. Just days before the singer-songwriter released her fourth studio album Faded Gloryville, Ortega proved why she is one artist to keep on the radar with mesmerizing vocals, killer stage presence and talent that begs to be heard.

Ortega began her set with the haunting “Murder of Crows” where her smokey vocals had her joking after the song. “So moody. I feel like we’re in the Red Light District tonight,” she said as a red spotlight engulfed her and her band.

Dressed in her signature red cowboy boots, gold sequin skirt and a black crop top she said she dressed up for the occasion. “I’ll have you know, I didn’t want to show up in my regular duds,” she said with a laugh. “I needed to be sparkly! I went to a vintage shop and B-lined for the sparkly section.”

Throughout her hour set, Ortega performed old fan favorites like the poignant “Dying of Another Broken Heart” off her 2008 EP The Drifter. On the stripped down track, Ortega captivated the sometimes rowdy crowd with her ethereal voice and memorable lyrics like “I don’t believe in fairy tales, I don’t believe in fate/ I don’t believe I’ll ever find my very own soul mate/ So take me to the hospital before it gets too late/ I’m dying of another broken heart.”

In addition to performing a few new tracks off Faded Gloryville like heartbreaking country ballad “Ashes” and the title track which she said is a song about the reality of doubting yourself and the dreams one decides to chase, she played some covers that had the crowd singing along word for word. Those covers included memorable guitar riffs on Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz,” spot-on vocals on the Bee Gee’s “To Love Somebody” and her own fiery rendition of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire.” The audience was entranced on each one and it was the kind of crowd that wasn’t lost on the singer.

“We’ve got a good crowd here tonight,” she remarked, pointing out fans in Dolly Parton, Sturgill Simpson and Social Distortion t-shirts. It was Ortega, though, who was the belle of the ball. When one fan screamed “you’re beautiful!” she shrugged off the compliment and asserted, “everyone’s beautiful with sparkles.” Sparkles or not, Ortega stole the show.

“The first writing session that we had was the easiest and most comfortable co-write you could ask for,” Trent Dabbs told me on a warm day in February in Nashville sitting inside his publicist’s office on Music Row. He, of course, was talking about his Sugar & the Hi-Lows bandmate Amy Stroup.

Dabbs, a well-known solo artist and producer, formed Sugar and the Hi-Lows with Stroup in 2012 after several productive co-writes where he recalls the songs were practically writing themselves.

“The more that Amy and I would write, the more inspired we felt, the more the songs were taking shape and getting better,” he adds. “I personally never felt like we plateaued as writers. We were only gaining momentum.”

Meanwhile, Stroup remembers her first co-write with Dabbs as being one of her favorite co-writes ever. One of the songs they wrote, “This Can’t Be the Last Time” appeared on their self-titled debut in 2012 after both artists decided it was time to start a band together.

While they’ve been together for a few years now, Sugar & the Hi-Lows’s sophomore album High Roller marks a new journey. The duo have further cemented their reputation as a must-see live act and dates opening for Kacey Musgraves continue to get their music out to a much bigger audience. The title track they wrote with Barry Dean, who Dabbs previously wrote Ingrid Michaelson’s “Girls Chase Boys” with, which also happened to be the first co-write for the duo.

“When he wrote with us, I could just feel that he was bringing out any shamelessness or quirks or anything that we had that we were hesitant to bring,” Dabbs admits. “I think that’s what makes a cool writer. We wanted to do a song that’s a straight up dance move that you can’t help but move around to. We played it at the Grand Ole Opry and no one was in their seat. There were people in the aisles. I felt like I was in The Blues Brothers.”

Stroup is quick to add that while writing “High Roller” she wanted to create a specific dance for the song inspired by her bandmates’ fancy footwork which is often highlighted at their live shows.

“I remember thinking, there are dances in the ‘60s, there are all these titles of songs, the shimmy and some of the ones we use in the second verse that we call out. ‘The Macarena’ was a huge song in the ‘90s. We were like, ‘Let’s try a modern day one that fits Sugar and the Hi-Lows.’”

So what exactly does that dance look like? The band show off some of their moves in the music video for the song above.

Highlights on the album include “Bees Love the Trees,” a title that Dabbs says was all Stroup’s idea. “I don’t know where in the world it came from,” he laughs, adding that it was a certain feeling they were chasing in their co-write.

“We were playfully calling out Music Row,” Stroup admits. “If you think about Johnny Cash style, if you remember, he released the Billboard article flicking off Music Row. There’s this badass sentiment, ‘We don’t need Music Row. Let’s be ourselves and see what happens,’” she says of the song.

While Stroup admits that they’re not flicking off Music Row per say, the song instead gives a nod to the rebels and artists who have forged their own path like Elvis Presley, Emmylou Harris, Jack White and Johnny Cash.

“There’s still something to offer when people seemingly don’t have all the attention of the corporate world looking on them. There’s still room for greatness coming out of these people time and time again,” she adds.

The album also includes “I Don’t Get High,” a song Dabbs says was an original way to tackle a love song, as well as “Right Time to Tell You” which is based around indecision. “If you listen to it, it feels like it has no finality but in the very last line it does,” Dabbs says. “It is about not wanting someone to leave, not letting them go. It’s a conversation I got from others.”

While Stroup admits that it’s scary to be so honest in co-writes, she says that writing with Dabbs allows her to say what she’s really feeling.

“There is some form of overcoming that, ‘Alright, this is how I feel and I’m just going to say it.’ Those are the songs that get me. I hope we can do that.”

Having frequently been compared to Carla Thomas and Otis Redding, it is this compliment that the duo don’t take lightly. In fact, Dabbs grew up listening to these classic singers and credits Redding and his father for influencing the band’s music.

“Listening to the classics like we did growing up and having a father say music isn’t good unless you can dance to it, helped us try to write songs that were more upbeat,” Dabbs said.

As for the comparisons to Redding and Thomas?

“You realize that you’re a ripple on a wave in an ocean and you’re just lucky to be in the ocean. I am thankful to be in the ocean and have influence on anyone,” he concludes.

Not many people have heard Kristian Bush‘s upcoming solo album Southern Gravity, which is due for release April 7. So, when I sit down with the country singer in Nashville for an interview and tell him I love what I’ve heard, he jumps out of his seat, a smile beaming across his face, and gives me a big hug.

“So very people have heard it, and I’m freaking out because fans are pre-ordering now, and it hit me two days ago,” he says excitedly. His voice is softer now, like he’s sharing a secret between friends. He’s genuinely excited about getting his new music out into the world, but also, understandably, a little anxious. This is, after all, his first solo album since his band Sugarland went on hiatus.

Fans, apparently, are excited to hear the music, too. As Bush relates, “When all those orders came in, they called me and said, ‘We’re out of the pre-orders. We need to reorder again.’ And I was like, ‘OK! That’s good news.’ And 20 minutes later I was like, ‘Oh no, they’re all going to hear it!’ It’s all starting to sink in.”

While country fans know Bush very well as one-half of Sugarland, many aren’t too familiar with his voice (his Sugarland partner Jennifer Nettles handles lead vocals). This fact is not lost on him. And the excitement for an album release isn’t, either.

“In a weird way, this is my third first record,” he says with a laugh. “I remember the first record with Billy Pilgrim, and I remember the first record with Sugarland, and this has the same energy. Most people who hear the music now, they don’t know it’s me because they’re not very familiar with it, because I didn’t sing very much in Sugarland. So it truly is, ‘Hello, my name is Kristian.’”

Bush says his new music will be a discovery process of sorts for people, as they’re now just figuring out what part of the DNA of the band he is.

Interestingly enough, Bush said not even his closest friends have put his voice and his current single “Trailer Hitch” together.

“They don’t connect the dots yet,” he says. “That’s the piece I think that’s interesting about that song. As soon as they start to go, ‘Oh!’ Then it’s the fun and the stories and the grooves you expect from Sugarland, except it’s me singing.”

Read my complete interview with Kristian Bush on Radio.com. His debut solo album, Southern Gravity, will be released on April 7.

On his fifth studio album Just Kids, which hit stores last month, Mat Kearney gets reflective. Throughout much of the album, the singer-songwriter looks back on his childhood and the beginning stages of his career.

As the Eugene, Oregon native explains, his parents moving the family away from his hometown when he was in middle school had a significant impact on him and influenced who he would become as a person.

“You’re mourning the loss of your hometown,” he reflects regarding that move. “A lot of Just Kids was written about that season of my life.”

Just Kids, however, reintroduces Kearney’s hip-hop side, something fans haven’t heard much of since his debut album Bullet in 2004.

“I think as an artist, maybe this is good or bad, but whatever I did before usually the opposite interests me the next time around,” he admits with a laugh. “The whole spoken word thing, maybe it’s reflecting on that season of my life and when I first started.”

Kearney admits that Just Kids is very autobiographical. On “Los Angeles,” he tells the tale of picking up and driving 29 hours from Nashville to Los Angeles when a friend offers up his studio to record.

“I think that was the season when I realized how important music was to me…that I would drive across the country, basically move for six weeks to be in a creative environment with people,” he reflects. “It was really becoming my first love, true love at that point.”

In between the nostalgic songs like “Los Angeles” and “One Black Sheep,” where Kearney likens himself to being the black sheep in his family, there are ’80s and ’90s pop-influenced love songs inspired by his wife, including his first two singles off the record, “Billion” and “Heartbeat.”

“She appreciates it but she isn’t affected like maybe someone would be,” he says, when asked if his wife enjoys being his muse. “It doesn’t get me out of taking the trash out. When I write, she’s like, ‘Oh, that’s a cool song.’ I’m like, ‘People pay to see me sing these, babe.’ She’s like, ‘OK, that’s cool.’ She’s very unimpressed, which is a healthy thing in our relationship.”

On a cold Friday night in January, silence came over a packed crowd at New York’s famed rock club Mercury Lounge. Not the norm for the often sweaty and loud venue, the Bros. Landreth were halfway into their soulful set when lead singer Joey Landreth began to sing “Let It Lie,” the poignant title track off their debut album released earlier that week (Jan. 27).

While the character in the song tells his lover that it’s time to move on, his voice tells a different story. Quiet, full of regret and endless questioning, Joey urges her to let things go while standing alone at the edge of the stage. Soon after, the band joined in. They lessened the quiet, but the crowd remained mesmerized.

Who are these people who can instill such quiet reverence among a normally rowdy audience at an NYC rock club? What is their secret?

The Bros. Landreth hail from Canada, made up of brothers Joey and Dave Landreth and longtime friends Ryan Voth and Ariel Posen. Taking influences from Americana, country, blues and rock, the Bros. Landreth feel like a combination of the Allman Brothers Band and the Eagles, with their blues-inspired guitar licks and memorable harmonies working alongside the pop sensibility and guitar virtuosity of a singer-songwriter like John Mayer.

“Those bands and artists are people who we have definitely spent a lot of time listening to and appreciating,” Joey Landreth says of the comparisons to the Allmans and the Eagles. “When someone picks out your influences like that, it’s pretty touching and very encouraging.”

As far as John Mayer’s influence, guitarist Ariel Posen said the singer changed his outlook on guitar music. “He opened my palette to a whole new style of music I wasn’t really listening to,” Posen confesses.

Bandmate Dave agrees, recalling his former band having played many Mayer covers. But what he most respects about the singer-songwriter is that he stuck to his guns and did his own thing musically.

“He put out a very pop record, and then he built on it, and then he abandoned it to chase down another thing, and then he put out Continuum, which was incredible,” Dave says. “Then he put out that blues record, which was so much fun and he got to shred all over it. And then his last two records are totally beautiful, grown up mature records. I respect the music, respect the man, respect the arc of his career and commitment to his integrity.”

Not unlike Mayer, the Bros. Landreth blend all these influences and passions on their debut album Let It Lie. While Joey admits it is a breakup album, he said it wasn’t intended as such.

“I think it’s served a purpose for some listeners to hopefully be catharsis for them as well. I think it has been,” Joey reflects. He adds, “We met a really drunk, brokenhearted dude one night, and he pulled me aside and was like, ‘Man, number 7.’ He was talking about the seventh song on the record. It was all he could muster.”

Dave Landreth explains that while the writing and recording process is an emotional catharsis for them, it is also a way to connect with music fans.

“When you hit those real poignant moments and connect with someone and their story, and you know that you’ve struck a chord, and for just a second that makes them feel better or pause to think, that’s really cool,” he says. “It’s a neat way to connect with complete strangers.”

Nearly six years ago, I interviewed singer-songwriter Joshua Radin for Marie Claire. I remember being struck by his honesty about the music industry, his former record label and songwriting. In December, I had the opportunity to catch up with Joshua again before he released his sixth studio album, Onward and Sideways. Just like in 2009, he was extremely open about his recording process and I learned that he first picked up guitar at 30, never with the intention of making a career out of it. Below is an excerpt of my interview.

When singer-songwriter Joshua Radin sat down in his hotel room in Stockholm to write a song to make a new flame fall in love with him, he had no intention for anyone else to hear the music.

“My motivation was to woo her in the old romantic sense of the word,” the 40-year-old singer told me during a phone conversation from his home in L.A. “I would lay in bed all day with the BBC on mute and I would just write, thinking, ‘Will this song make her fall in love with me?’ I wasn’t even thinking of recording the songs for anybody but her.”

Soon enough he had a full body of work, and since the songs did what he set out to accomplish (she fell in love with him and now lives with Radin in L.A.), he decided to release them into the world as his sixth studio album, Onward and Sideways, which was released earlier this month.

“If they had not been successful I might have scrapped them. They are in the true sense a love letter,” Radin says.

Recorded in Stockholm and L.A., Onward and Sideways is 13 tracks of Radin’s delicate singing and vivid storytelling. From the early stages of a relationship on “Another Beginning” to the uncertainty of how to tell his sweetheart how he feels on “Blow Away,” it is as if the listener is inside that Stockholm hotel room as Radin performs the songs.

Which is exactly what he intended. “It’s like I’m telling a story to one person and they’re eavesdropping in a conversation,” he says. “There’s no way I would have been able to tell this woman how I truly felt about her, unless I wrote it in song.”

When asked if the songs from Onward and Sideways convinced his girlfriend to move to L.A. with him, he laughs.

“Hopefully it was not just the songs,” Radin reflects. “That’s why I really, really love this album, because what it accomplished is exactly what I wanted it to accomplish. Even if it sells just 10 copies, it’s OK. If it doesn’t do well at all commercially, it’s not the end of the world. It’s already achieved what I wanted it to achieve.”

Read my complete interview with Joshua Radin at Radio.com. You can hear his music in the latest Subaru commercial below.

On Friday, (Jan. 16) Hailey Tuck made her New York debut to a packed crowd at Joe’s Pub. Taking the stage shortly after midnight, in a vintage dress and with a mesmerizing voice, it was evident from the very first song that Tuck would leave the crowd wanting more jazz in their lives.

She kicked the night off with a jazzy cover of Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” Standing in front of a piano, drum kit and upright bass, it was as if Tuck transported the audience to the roaring 1920s with her voice and jazz-styled songs.

Whether it was the classics or her own take on Maroon 5’s “Sunday Morning,” she impressed. Prefacing “Sunday Morning,” Tuck dedicated the song to the guitarist of Maroon 5 who dated her sister. “I was in love with him. I hope if he hears it he’ll realize he dated the wrong sister,” she said of her childhood crush on James Valentine at the song’s close.

Other highlights included a cover of The Zombies “Tell Her No” as well as Tuck’s own originals like “So In Love.” While she admitted that she planned to get by as a jazz singer by just performing the classics, she said multiple people urged her to write her own music and she soon thought otherwise.

Tuck got her start as a singer at 18 when she bought a one-way ticket to Paris with the dream to become a jazz performer. The Texas native is now readying a new EP, which is due out later this year.

Caitlyn Smith has been writing for as long as she can remember. As a kid, she’d sit in her bedroom for hours coming up with stories and songs.

“I started writing when I was 8 years old,” she told me over coffee during a recent visit to New York. “And instead of doing the normal kid thing of sports, I would come home from school and go into my closet and push the dresser all the way to the side and sit in my closet and write. I would write poetry. I would write songs. I would just make stuff up for hours.”

All that practice came to fruition last year when the country singer-songwriter heard a song she had written on the radio for the first time. It was a song she’d written with her husband, Rollie Gaalswyk, over a bottle of red wine called “Wasting All These Tears,” which was recorded by Cassadee Pope.

“He [Gaalswyk] was in the garage and had the radio on, and the song came on and he runs in the house and he’s like, ‘Get out here!’ And so I run out into the garage and we turn it up all the way and dance around our garage. It was just a super magical moment. Really, really fun,” she recalls with a big smile.

To some, it might sound strange to write a breakup song like “Wasting All These Tears” with your husband, but for Smith it’s just another day at work.

“We’re both writers and we both have crazy ideas and crazy lines coming,” she admits. “I don’t always write from, ‘I have lived every word of this song.’ Sometimes when you write you put on an actor hat and you can play a different character, which makes writing breakup songs with your husband a little easier.”

She says that the two of them “keep doing it because we like writing with each other. Sometimes it ends in a fight,” she laughs, “and sometimes it’s awesome.”

“Wasting All These Tears” became a platinum-selling single for Pope. But it’s not the only song that has helped raise Smith’s profile as a writer. Her catalog also includes songs that have been cut by such high-profile artists as Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton (the GRAMMY-nominated “You Can’t Make Old Friends”), Lady Antebellum (“747″), Rascal Flatts (“Let It Hurt”) and even Garth Brooks (“Tacoma”). More recently, Smith has her writing credit on Meghan Trainor’s new album Title where Trainor duets with John Legend on a song called “Like I’m Gonna Lose You.”

In addition to songwriting, Smith has been a performer as well for years. She’s recorded and released several albums on her own—her first at 15 years old—and just this past fall released a seven-song EP titled Everything To You. While “Tacoma” isn’t on the track list, the EP does include Smith’s own version of “Wasting All These Tears,” along with six more tracks that showcase her powerful storytelling.